Work Text:
A boy laughs at Hitori while they're walking home from school.
It's not the worst thing in the world. They're in broad daylight, and Hitori is demonstrating some complex chord on air strings, jabbing and jittering like she's losing a martial arts duel with empty space. It's funny, really, it is, if you don't know her, and she's just some stranger with hands that hit six positions per second in a faded pink tracksuit. Not to mention the boy's laugh isn't a bully's laugh — the kind the victim's supposed to overhear — but a stifled giggle, almost embarrassed, which he hides by coughing and pretending to adjust his glasses.
And Hitori doesn't notice. The only reason Ikuyo does is because she's idly trying to place how she knows him. Hitori's coming off three hours of sleep, two shows in a week and a lyric-writing session that ran until two in the morning. She's run herself a little ragged emotionally, sure, but she's missed maybe half the words Ikuyo's said to her, lost in an artistic delirium that leaves her thrice as resilient as normal. So a boy laughs at her and her eyes don't even flicker, and objectively, it's not that bad.
"It wasn't that bad," Ikuyo tells herself, when she asks her friends about boys in their grade who wear green-rimmed glasses. "He didn't mean anything by it," she tells herself, noticing his name in the student directory while she idly flips through it. She doesn't exaggerate the story, when she tells a classmate — a girl — who leaves the classroom to eat lunch with him on the regular. The only reason Ikuyo even mentions it is because they've been randomly assigned to a project together, and they have a conversation that drifts naturally towards mutual acquaintances, and the boy who laughed at Hitori is one.
"I don't want to make a big deal out of it, or anything," says Ikuyo, smiling sheepishly. And she doesn't! Objectively, nothing terrible happened. Gotoh Hitori isn't a laughingstock, like she sometimes thinks she is, but she's been made fun of at least once in her life. It's a universal law of public education. And here she is, not dead, not a NEET. There's nothing to avenge but a little risk, the fractional chance that Hitori might've been having a bad enough day that —
(None of you caught her.)
And maybe she's just working off the fact that the cultural festival had almost been perfect, Hitori had almost had the kind of shining moment she was supposed to have been getting since she was a kid, the kind she'd inexplicably been excluded from, and then —
(None of you.)
Well, but all Kita Ikuyo does is say exactly and only what happened, and if her voice is a little more subdued than a little laughter merits, it's her problem and nobody else's.
And the next day, the girl doesn't go to eat lunch with the boy, she just sits at her desk not looking at her phone, and local normie extrovert Kita Ikuyo (who everyone knows is weird about the girls she likes, sure, but in a fun, ordinary way) sits down and smiles into her rice and thinks "Serves you right."